It was during the second lockdown in the Netherlands that I started taking daily walks in a nearby park. By the second or third time, I noticed the thrill of looking strangers in the eye. I’ve always been so shy, I thought, it’s interesting how much I missed that connection that it pushes me out of my normal habit. But it wasn’t interesting. It was, at most, revealing of some banal conditions of my past and current life.
I have been “shy” because women are mostly taught not to make eye contact with people (read: men) out on the streets, either through explicit indoctrination or via experience (an accidental eye contact with a man may result in unsolicited advances). But now I was aware that this park, this city, was safer than what I am used to. And now I was craving human contact in a way that I haven’t before. I was eager and ready to pick up the crumbs of social interaction that I could get my hands (or my eyes) on.
I kept going on my daily walks. I picked mornings, sometimes afternoons. The unyielding gray of the Dutch fall sky didn’t take away the extra layer of safety the daylight afforded.
It was the morning after a night when a friend shared a frightening and infuriating experience she had on the streets of Amsterdam, biking home at night. Although it was something I never experienced, the sense of the dark night and its urban dangers were palpable to me immediately. That morning felt like I woke up from a disturbing dream into the revelation of the gray, depressing morning light. I must warn you; it is a pretty anticlimactic revelation. Nevertheless.
I woke up with a pang of annoyance about the modern figure of the flâneur, and how unashamedly, unapologetically male it was.
Flâneur —one who walks aimlessly on the modern city streets, a stroller, a wanderer, an observer. A figure that is entangled with names like Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. A figure that, when I learned about it in my undergraduate class “Modern European Literature,” 5-6 years ago, excited me in a way that only the (western, male) figure of the artist, the writer, the poet could excite me back then: to my core, painfully, to my weakest heart, and towards a sense of always trying to reach something so far from me, so not me.
That morning I kept feeling that strong sense of annoyance that bordered on anger about the gender blindness this figure blatantly brought with itself, at least in my memories. “We sure must have talked about the issue of gender, right?” I thought. My inspection of the pages of my old notebook from those years yielded only some comparisons between literary characters and no mention of the issue of gender.
Later I learned, of course, that this figure was criticized by feminists, or by thinkers who saw the problematic maleness that was engrained in the experience of flânerie. They asked questions like “can there ever be a flâneuse (a female flâneur)?” and debated concepts such as the male gaze, labor, consumerism, long before I had this uneventful revelation in my own head.
My anticlimactic revelation has been less about a sense of discontent regarding my past curriculum, and more about how I clearly did not pay attention to this figure from a feminist lens. Yet, I remember the feeling of being a bit enamored by the flâneur’s troubled, modern detachment roaming the city streets and indulging in his observance of the industrialized, crowded city. A figure of the artist that for some reason could spend hours walking in the city, which made me notice that I didn’t register back then how much privilege this figure carried in terms of class and race, either.
The man of flânerie wanders through the urban landscape with certain luxurious possessions in his pockets, like time and wealth. He also walks as if he carries his own atmosphere around his head, an atmosphere in which he can breathe in observation, and breathe out knowledge, possibly materialized in his poems and essays about the city and modern life.
There is also something about those pockets. The word is not just a metaphor for carrying something abstract like time. There is an undeniable connection between the mobility of men in the public space, and “pocket disparity” —as the brilliant Avery Trufelman puts it in her podcast Articles of Interest. (For those who are curious about a critical history of pockets, and more, I highly recommend the episode “Pockets”.)
I know that among those who read these words, some wear clothes that have annoyingly small pockets, if any. How many times you, or a friend, flaunted the pockets in their dress or skirt? A verbal ping-pong of: “What a beautiful dress!” “Thank you, it has pockets!”
Those who have proper pockets can walk through the world with a specific comfort and confidence that come from knowing you have not only your tools and necessities at hand, but you have them close to your body. A bag can be stolen or lost, Trufelman reminds us, but pockets are hidden. The luxury of forgetting your pockets and what is in them (as opposed to the menial act of keeping an eye on your bag) can be seen as a form of privilege only men’s clothes provide.
Similar to how he carries his necessities in his pockets without much thought —his tools for creation (like the pen and paper), or mobility (e.g., money, keys, tickets)— the flâneur can carry his privacy into the public space, driving his artistry and intellect. Unlike the privacy flâneur can maintain in public (he roams through the crowds and observes silently without being harassed), women’s privacy rarely translates into an artistic or epistemic one. The luxury of aimlessness (or the act of wandering, strolling) still separates them from the flâneur. When women are “aimless” on the street, it is often interpreted as inviting (unwelcomed) advances from men.
I keep talking about “women,” because that is my personal experience, but I cannot keep myself from thinking how specific the body of this “flâneur” has been. My beef with the flâneur is not merely about the problematic power relations between the signifiers “man” and “woman,” but also about the ongoing exclusion of certain bodies from public space. A black body, a trans body, or a non-conforming body not only cannot wander in the city the same way the modernist European protagonists wandered, but they also face the danger of blatant violence against their existence. My newly acquired annoyance with the flâneur keeps touching my despair about public violence that falls through the cracks of broken justice systems.
But walking can be many things —many beautiful things. Some have written about it from a more enthusiastic angle (Rebecca Solnit), or a feminist one (Lauren Elkin).
Walking can be an activity of revelation (I took long walks whenever I felt stuck with my thesis last year, or whenever I felt something subtly brewing in my head and I wanted it to freely come out and take shape).
It can be a bonding activity (I remember the walks we used to take with my mom, in the park that was the middle point between our houses in Izmir. It was during those walks I felt we got to know each other on a brand new level. Our conversation being colored anew with each step through the green grass, our gazes restfully wandering through giant trees, hundred years old maybe, and our words spilling into the fresh spring air).
It can also be a soothing activity (I have a vivid memory of a solo walk in the little forest behind my house in Utrecht after getting my heart broken. Although the pain had numbed my mind, the silence it brought had fit perfectly with the sounds of wilderness that accompanied my body’s rhythm of anguish and my footsteps’ search for a cure).
Walking can be a beautifully wonderous experience. But, especially in the city, it has not been a neutral activity that everybody can enjoy to the same degree.
“Walking, like the capacity for boredom, is a form of intimacy with oneself —with one’s thoughts, one’s world, one’s imaginative and bodily sense of being,” I recently read on Brain Pickings.
In the urban landscape, such experiences of walking are a luxury only available to certain bodies. I am privileged to think while I walk, and to go for daily walks at all. My body does not disturb the norms laid out strictly in the public sphere. Moreover, where I walk is a space of privilege itself —a European city with neatly laid out parks and a strong sense of regulations and rules. There is a feeling of safety here that I didn’t have much of before in the cities of Turkey. Yet whichever city I may walk in (European or Turkish), if it is a “dangerous” hour, or if my body goes through streets where there are not that many people, I cannot afford to “lose myself in thought,” nor I can pay attention to my walking body and my surroundings in an imaginative manner. In those moments, I pay attention to my body in a very specific sense: I try my hardest to appear smaller (to attract less attention, to be invisible, if possible), less curvy (baggy coats feel safer than tight ones), uglier (I slightly contort my face into an unpleasant expression). This is a load of attentiveness that leaves no room whatsoever for an intimacy.
But maybe this is the worst time to be writing about the flâneur. The act of strolling across the city population, surrendering to that experience of the self among large crowds is globally unimaginable as it ever was. There are no crowds to get lost in (well, at least in most places), and even when there are, the sensation is the opposite of losing one’s self among crowds of people. Now, if we are in a crowd, anxiety kicks in. We are irrevocably aware of the people around us, less able to get lost in our thoughts as we walk through the city. Our steps are careful, the distance between bodies always calculated.
Yet my annoyance with this male figure (and with all its privileges) and my anxious curiosity about how our movements in the urban landscape would change with the experience of the pandemic are somehow connected. Can this altered relation to walking in the city become a marker upon our ways of seeing, or imagining the experiences of different bodies on the street? Can it make us more aware of the cobblestones we step on, sometimes quickly without thinking, and consider the possibility that maybe one of those stones was once a brief confidant, protector of the gaze of a girl who rushed home in that perfectly balanced speed —not too fast (don’t attract extra attention), and not too slow (don’t appear too nonchalant as if you are “asking for” attention). Those unresponsive cobblestones, and the infinity of memories they hold —of gazes, of traumatized skins, blood, and clacking rhythm of heels.
https://www.boshemiamagazine.com/blog/the-flaneur-and-the-flaneuse-the-culture-of-women-who-wander-cities
You probably know this, Pinar, but just in case... Loved your text. Relatable, from a different perspective of course
I just came across this short film from 2019 entitled "The Flaneur", you can watch it here + review by a nice critical media scholar: https://indyfilmlibrary.com/2021/01/29/the-flaneur-2019-4-stars/